A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [51]
“But you let me do it instead. You let me call up the men and order them to shoot you. My men, your men. You put that on their souls and mine. If I could ever understand why, I’d find some peace. Why not let the Germans do it for you. You wouldn’t have been the first. Nor the last.”
“Aye, it’s what ye did, but no’ even the Hun could touch you. You were left wi’ your shame. Ye ken, it’s why I willna’ go. No’ now, no’ yet.”
“For God’s sake, tell me why!”
There was a knock at his door, cutting through the darkness in his mind. Smith called out, “Mr. Rutledge? Are you all right?”
He realized that the snoring had stopped—had been stopped for some time, for all he knew. And his shouting could be heard all over the inn.
Rutledge cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry, Smith. It was a bad dream. I didn’t mean to disturb the house.”
There was a moment of silence on the other side of the door. “If you’re sure then?”
“I’m sure.”
He listened to the man’s footsteps receding across the passage, and a door shutting.
Rutledge lay back against his pillows, his body still tense, his fists clenched, not certain when he’d sat up in bed or for how long the exchange with Hamish had been loud enough to be heard.
Hamish said, in the darkness, “But they canna’ hear me. Only you can.”
10
Rutledge was awake when at the back of the inn a rooster crowed, welcoming the early spring dawn. He got up, shaved and dressed, and went outside to walk off his mood.
For a mercy, Hamish was silent.
He found pansies blooming in the shadow of the small barn, and a clutch of hens picking busily at the sparse grass of the yard, then he walked on, down the road to Wayland’s Smithy.
It was smaller than he remembered from childhood, but still an impressive grave. For whom? A chieftain? A warrior? Or perhaps a high priest, the Merlin of his age.
Whoever had lain here, the power of his name had given him a great stone tomb, monoliths that time had barely eroded. And whatever grave goods had been buried with him were long since taken away as the power of his name faded in human memory. And the bones, had they also been scattered?
Rutledge squatted down to look inside and shuddered. A narrow room in which to spend eternity. Claustrophobic and dark.
He thought about Gaylord Partridge, who was being left to rot in an unmarked, unmourned grave, because in some fashion he had offended people with a long memory for revenge.
An outcast. Like the others who lived in the Tomlin Cottages. Lepers, without the sores.
What had Partridge done to deserve his fate? A spy would have been tried and shot behind walls where no one could see him die. How had he offended? That was the crux of this business, to know why he was better off dead in a back corner of a Yorkshire graveyard—a fortuitous death, surely, for those who had hated him.
Or had it been somehow engineered?
That was something to be considered. The army looked after its own, but transgressors were beyond the pale. Abandoned.
T. E. Lawrence had offended and been snubbed. Would anyone weep if he died conveniently on a back road where no one knew him?
It was time to go back to the inn. Rutledge turned away from the tomb and retraced his steps, thinking.
When Rutledge had finished his breakfast in the quiet of the bar—empty and well scrubbed by Smith before the tea had steeped—he refreshed his memory about the nine people who lived near the foot of the great White Horse.
He had met only two of them, these neighbors of one Gaylord Partridge.
Slater, the smith, first to the left. Then Partridge, with the only gate in the low walls of the cottage gardens. The next five in the horseshoe he hadn’t met, but Rutledge had seen Number 4 staring up at him as he paced along the mane of the horse. Although Martin Deloran in London had never indicated that there was another watcher, Rutledge’s training told